Author Archives: Dr Benjamin Habib

How do we unite to permaculture our way out of the crisis? How can we get people up to speed with ecological literacy and resilience thinking? What can we to avoid going back to our old ways post-COVID? These questions and more are discussed here in CERES Winter Webinar #1 featuring Kat Lavers, Dr Keri Chiveralls, and Dr Ben Habib, facilitated by Lorna Pettifer.

Thank you to April Sampson-Kelly for interviewing me for her Permaculture Visions video series. In this video we discuss permaculture design for the care of people. We touch on nurturing healthy and productive social spaces, and “holding space” for nurturing collaboration. We also explore the idea of horizontal organisational models as governance models for people care instead of hierarchical systems.

Examines the permaculture ethics from the perspective of systems of power. Permaculture practice needs nourishing economic, social and cultural ground in which to take root, yet much of our society today is a desert in that respect. We need to incorporate an understanding of power into our social permaculture pattern literacy if we’re to turn that desert into a flourishing garden of Earth care, people care and fair share.

In Episode 5 of the Social Permaculture Online Bootcamp, Ben Habib explores how we are nested in webs of relationships with each other and with all of life on Earth, through different intersecting ecological, social and economic systems. Ben also introduces social permaculture “sectors” as a pattern language to help us locate ourselves in relation to the different inter-connected systems that influence our lives.

In Episode 4 of the Social Permaculture Online Bootcamp, Ben Habib draws on the concept of permaculture “zones,” and specifically how they might be interpreted in a social permaculture context, to inventory our networks of interpersonal relationships. Ben also introduces a social permaculture patterning tool, inspired by the zoning concept, of levels of political organisation of increasing scale from the individual to the global.

In Episode 3 of the Social Permaculture Online Bootcamp, Ben Habib explores reclaiming more control over our subsistence through gift economies and the commons, as a compliment to food production. This video’s activity prompts participants to create a basic “gift circle” as an easily replicable model of community-level exchange to obtain some of the things we need, outside of money economy. The objective is not just to obtain more of what we need through networks of mutual aid, but also to lay the foundation of sharing and reciprocity needed for larger-scale alternative economic systems for the post-COVID19 recovery and post-carbon transition.

In Episode 2 of Social Permaculture Online Bootcamp, Ben Habib confronts the feeling of overwhelm that many are feeling in the COVID-19 moment. Ben looks to the acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) framework for guidance, and specifically to a recent article “FACE COVID” published by renowned psychotherapist Russ Harris. Ben likes this model to help get grounded so that we can put one foot in front of the other and make the next decision.

In this first episode of the series, Ben Habib introduces the ‘Social Permaculture Online Bootcamp’. With an emphasis on transmutation, this series will explore issues, problems and anxieties associated with the COVID-19 crisis, and draw from insights from social permaculture and beyond to think about how we might respond.

In this presentation at Monash University, Ben presents a case, drawing on complex systems thinking with a dash of political geography and political ecology, that geography is an under-appreciated variable in patterns of governance, economy and human security in North Korea, that geography as inter-dependent with and complimentary to institutional, economic and cultural perspectives.

In this presentation at APSA 2019, Ben offers a critical exploration of permaculture as a design methodology, system of ethics, community of practice, and social movement, which function as a vehicle for sustainability transitions and practice of a materialist politics. He also encourages academics of environmental politics to reflect on the appropriate balance of research, sustainability practice and environmental activism demanded by the urgent predicament of global climate and ecological crisis.

In this presentation to VCE Global Politics students on 2 August 2019, hosted by Social Education Victoria, Dr Ben Habib explores how climate change interacts with other global crises listed in Unit 4 of the VCE Global Politics syllabus–armed conflict, terrorism, and economic instability.

Sunday’s trilateral meeting in the Korean Demilitarized Zone between US President Donald Trump, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, and South Korean President Moon Jae In made for compelling viewing, the latest chapter in Korean peninsula summit diplomacy.

Every time North Korea needles the US with another provocation, it represents a loss of face for Trump and makes it harder for him to mobilise the domestic support in the US for a return to the negotiating table.

Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un met in Vladivostok on the 25 April. While no agreements were signed, Chairman Kim got another opportunity to boost his legitimacy through the prestige of leader-to-leader diplomacy and President Putin to explore the possibility of dealing Russia back into Northeast Asian diplomacy and to network Russia into the East Asian economy.

In 2015-2017 I led environment and sustainability-themed short travel program study tours for undergraduate students to China and South Korea. These were among the most rewarding professional experiences of my […]

The videos included here introduce my current study into teaching sustainability transition practice through the short overseas travel program subject Environment and Sustainability in East Asia. In three iterations of […]